


Quod Erat Demonstrandum

by proxydialogue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:40:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proxydialogue/pseuds/proxydialogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is tired of being the moral compass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quod Erat Demonstrandum

**Author's Note:**

> Archived from LJ. Orig pub: 11/26/2010

Sherlock didn't see the difference: "The game resumes, John!" his black coat whipping out the door.   
    
Killed with a blunt object, a rabbit's foot found in her pocket; everyone agreed curses were ridiculous but she was the third in a week. When Lestrade glanced away John felt Sherlock slip the gruesome luck charm into his hand, plundered from the body. John swallowed back his shudder and tucked it into his jacket.   
    
"She's dead," Sherlock said sternly, as if that answered everything. As if death was the ultimate excuse for apathy and pity became a vestigial emotion after the final transformation of a living body to a decomposing one. He tucked his spyglass away and took a deep breath through his nose. "Pumpkin spice," he mumbled and began combing though his silent deductions with relish. This was Sherlock in love again, head over heels in the throws of a new mystery.   
    
"She's seven," John argued in a whisper. As if  _that_  were an excuse. As if there was a minimum hysteria requirement with an inverse function to age:  _f_ (n) _=_ malicious intent +age / 3.14. John turned his face away to breathe.   
    
When Sherlock looked up at John with expectation in his gray eyes John shoved him out of the way to kneel beside Jessie Cordero. He was tired of being the moral compass. He was tired of being human enough for two. Sherlock bounced idly on his toes while he waited for the diagnosis.   
    
 _Just once,_  John thought viciously,  _I’d like to see his heart break._     
  

xXx

    
    
Three hours later Harry called. John answered, figuring it was best to get this muddle over with now, while he had a reservoir of anger in his chest and no excusable outlet. His fingers brushed the rabbit's foot in his pocket. He managed a tersely polite "Hello."   
    
John was flossing his teeth in the bathroom to get the smell of dying flesh out of his nose and throat, Harry's voice crackled through the speakerphone from the edge of the sink. John avoided the sight of the mirror. The after image of a gaping jack-o-lantern mouth in the face of a seven year old girl, lips cut up by the shards of her shattered teeth, lingered there. He would never stop dreaming of her. She would join the gangrenous limbs and screaming amputees, the bleeding stomachs and begging boys. The man who had stumbled, blind, into John's medical tent wearing the soft tan color of the desert; John had almost put a hole in his skull before he saw the blackened cap badge the man clutched in his hand.  _Have a seat,_  John told him, and the eyeless man collapsed to his ass in the dirt. Harry asked what it was like.   
    
 _Trust issues._  Thought John.   
    
"It's like living with a deformed  _freak_ ," He confessed and spit into the sink, "who is  _always right behind you_." John's very own persistent and torturous shadow:  _the past._    
    
A flash of dark navy in the mirror made John look up. He saw Sherlock standing in the doorway over his shoulder. His pale face reminded John of how young Sherlock was. His gray eyes, wide and without armor, reminded John of something Moriarty had said. His nervous, empty, fingers reminded John of...Babel somehow. Collapsing.   
    
Sherlock licked his lips and then the doorway was empty.   
    
"You shouldn’t talk about yourself that way," said Harry's unhappy voice from the sink.   
    
"Sherlock!" John called following not fast enough. "Sherlock, I didn't mean—" the click of the living room door. John sat down against the wall just outside the bathroom door and knew he was alone in the flat. Except for Harry's grating voice, of course, calling him in concern, distorted and far away. " _Damn_  it."   
    
"Mrs. Hudson made tea," said Sherlock's voice from the kitchen. John startled to his feet and found his flat mate standing with a bleached-clean expression by table, with the kettle in his grip. "Would you like one?" He'd already poured John a cup, and it was extended in his other hand.   
    
"Sherlock—"   
    
"You left the door open, hence the draft." The kitchen was cold.   
    
"Sherlock I'm—"   
    
"There's no need to apologize for simple observation, John." Sherlock pressed the scalding cup into John's hand. His eyes were iron gates.   
    
"No. Sherlock, I wasn't talking about you." Sherlock didn't seem to pause or care. "I was talking about  _me_ , alright? Damaged war veteran? Bad memories that follow you around?" Harry was hollering from the bathroom.   
    
Sherlock stilled and deconstructed him over the lip of his teacup. The silence that followed was just long enough for John to remind himself that he didn't believe in curses. And it hadn't been a broken heart he'd seen, but the awful look of unexpectedly burned fingertips. Sherlock, reaching out through unfamiliar friendship, trusting his flat-mate to know him better than: "I'm a higher functioning sociopath." Burned.   
    
The crooked smile that came at last spread like a cracking mirror, but it was good.   
    
"You have a misconception of the word, then," Sherlock said, clipped and dismissive as ever. "It denotes something which is perverse from the point of its creation." He held out a peanut butter biscuit like a peace treaty. "A freak is a freak by nature, John, not by conditioning." John hated peanut butter, but Sherlock had never offered him a biscuit before. "You are merely psychologically scarred." John took the biscuit, ate it and hated it, but felt relief trickle into his stomach.   
    
"Yeah," he agreed. He went back to the bathroom and hung up on Harry, who was threatening to come over and check on him.   
    
Then he took a walk, just to feel the bitter breeze on his face telling him where he wasn't.   
    
"I didn't mean it." John mumbled to the rabbit's foot. He cradled the horrid thing in his hand for a moment and thought about the uselessness of language before he chucked it into the Thames. His phone binged with a text.   
    
 _If you're finished with being meaninglessly symbolic, I am about to solve the case. SH_    
   
Then again.   
    
 _And that was evidence, you twat. You're lucky I didn't need it. SH_    
   
John jammed his phone in his pocket, whirled to dash home and was broad sided suddenly by the memory of Sherlock pulling a makeshift tarp up over the battered face of a dead seven year old girl while he, John and Lestrade waited in the rain for the FME. It was a glimpse of one of those rare, half-second spaces between chains of deduction; Sherlock's mouth was turned down in a frown.   
    
Not a broken heart, but like a man with all the nerves seared out of his hand reaching back into the fire. 


End file.
